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Possible Dead Hard Drive

I have found myself in need of more hard drive space and was thinking I could install my games on a seperate drive which free up a lot of space! I have an old 60GB IDE HD, which apparently went dead. Now I'm not 100% sure what happened to it, all I know is that it would not boot from this drive when Windows XP was installed on it, so I ended up removing it.

If I do reinstall this drive. Can someone advise me on some tough methods to really check each and every part of the drive to make sure it still functions?

Also this wont effect my current running system if the drive is faulty will it?

As to jumpering, you would ordinarily set the second hard drive to slave.

That being said, you should also check your existing drive, as you may need to change the jumpers there, too. Some drives have separate settings for Master with slave as opposed to single-like your old drive does. You will need to look. Western Digitals are famous for having those multiple settings, and you will need to get the right combination.

1st Drive, I'm guessing was just dead, as it said couldnt access it... Oh wait...*Few* its ok, my 2nd drive is still displayed in my computer. It wasnt there when I connected the the 3rd drive. But since it didnt access that drive I tried another, same thing, didnt display my 2nd drive but told me the 3rd drive wasnt formatted. I left it alone, as at boot up I got a blue screen so long, it had to scroll the page down!

I think I'll stop here (at stage one) so that I dont damaage my PC further! I'll have to get someone with more experience to install a 3rd drive in my PC! Thank you for your help... for now...

But now I will run as many Disk Checks on my C:, D: as possible to make sure they're ok!

Ok I bought a new DVD-RW drive which should arrive 2mo morn and I'll be installing it 2mo too, so while I've got the PC opened up, I'm going to attempt installing a third hard drive...again!

Now, Drive 1 = SATA, Drive 2 = IDE, Drive 3 = IDE???

OK I guess I can install two hard drives on one IDE cable *fingers crossed* so since I've not done this before, I need ANYONES help please!

Fisrt of all, there are three ports to the IDE cable, the bottom is plugged into the motherboard, the middle is plugged into drive 2, the top end is empty. Can I plug in the third drive into the top end of the IDE cable, or do I need to switch its position with Drive 2?

So I either end up with: A = IDE Top in drive 2, IDE middle in Drive 3, IDE bottom in Moboard. Or: B = IDE Top in Drive 3, IDE middle in Drive 2, IDE bottom in Moboard.

Once that is sorted I have the whole slave/master pin stuff with the new hard drive that is going in. I will get that looked at by someone in a shop, but I'm guessing that goes on Slave as is Drive 2?

Haha!! Success!! It worked! I have both IDE drives showing and booted up with my SATA drive without probs! Although this is my bro's old hard drive and he still has windows media centre installed on it with the drive partitioned in two, although there wasnt a dual-boot function at boot up.

However windows won't let me format the drive for some reason? It keeps telling me to make sure no disk utility is in use or windows open with the drive contents, so this might take some time to figure out

Oh no, I used that Norton GoBack program a long time ago and almost lost an entire drive's contents after uninstalling it and never went back to it. I dont know whats stopping the format?! I have this program that unlocks any running process on items that cant be accessed or deleted, but after running that it still says it cant be formatted because its in use :S